You’re friend asks you for help on a university assignment. Do you help her? If yes, would you change your answer if you are doing the same assignment? If you said no, why? Does Is the plagiarism policy that your classes beat over your head that’s on your conscience? Is it the feeling that you’ve worked hard to do it on your own and helping someone else is helping a free loader?

I’m reluctant to help friends because of this some times, and it always bothers me afterwards because it’s silly. Translate this into the real world. You’re friend and colleague has had a busy week and can’t get his portion of the work done in time, so he asks you for help. Do you help him? If you were a true friend and assuming you had the time and knowledge, you would. By helping him it’s a chance for you to show your appreciation for your friendship, and you can bond over the work. It helps him get through that week of work and your relationship strengthens. Everyone wins. Back to the assignment scenario. If you help your friend, you might get caught for plagiarism. If you help your friend, she might do better than you in the assignment. The fact that you’re being judged for your work creates an ethical dilemma between your duty to your friendship and your duty to encourage what’s fair which is to let her finish the assignment without help so that she does not have an unfair advantage over others.

This is what the education system got wrong. In the real world, opportunity for collaboration far outweigh the opportunity for competition. Sure if you were competing for a job position in an interview you might be reluctant to help, but most of the time it’s beneficial to collaborate. Most academic assessments do not encourage collaboration.

The problem starts in school, where the no cheating policy is heavily emphasised. Schools have implanted the association between cheating and everything bad into our minds. Cheating is a loaded word. Most of the time, cheating is simply copying, it’s a form of imitation. People imitate all the time; ideas build on ideas. It’s a natural thing to do, if someone figured out a solution to a hard problem, you would want to know. The said person would want to share it and put his name to the credits. In school you can’t do that. You can write down the solution to a problem and give credit to your classmate who showed it to you. You are expected to do everything by yourself, without the help of others. There is a reason for that, and that is to help you learn. You cannot learn effectively if all you’re doing is copying everyone all the time. You need to have original ideas, or at least, you need to be able to take someone’s idea/solution/answer whatever, and build on it.

I’m not apologetic for plagiarism or cheating here, I’m simply complaining that there isn’t enough opportunities for collaboration in schools. Sure individual learning is important, but we need to learn to collaborate as well. The assessment structure that most courses have does not encourage this, it sets up competing ethical dilemmas that is counter intuitive to situations that most of us will face in the real world.